A great piece on the importance of retail advertsing to the newspaper business and the indirect fight between Amazon and the papers happening now.

“Classifieds has decimated by interactive databases. National has migrated strongly digital. Retail, which made up of just 47 percent of newspaper ad revenues 10 years ago, is now up to 57 percent of newspaper totals. Now that advertising, albeit in just a few markets initially, will have to compete with Amazon-forced marketplace change.

Amazon, of course, isn’t targeting newspaper revenues. It’s targeting customers — selling more to current ones and engaging new ones. Further hits to newspaper revenue are just another unintended consequence of accelerating disruption of all business as usual. “

The creation of new marketplaces for shopping on the web, tablets and mobile are at the center of what the newspapers must to move past relevance in retail shopping to being critical players for local retail shopping in the next 10 years